


bereft in deadly bloom

by cassandralied



Series: a little of you & a lot of bloodletting [3]
Category: Dracula (TV 2020), Dracula - Bram Stoker
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Child Death, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Madness, Psychological Torture, Threats of Violence, aaaaand we're back, about canon levels of both, implicit threat of rape but it's not spoken, just say dracula is bi cowards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-19 15:27:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22167085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassandralied/pseuds/cassandralied
Summary: Jonathan gets used to his new home. Still hasn't learned how to keep quiet, though.
Relationships: Brides of Dracula/Count Dracula (past), Count Dracula/Jonathan Harker
Series: a little of you & a lot of bloodletting [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592500
Comments: 15
Kudos: 202





	bereft in deadly bloom

**Author's Note:**

> all Romanian is from Google Translate -I apologize if it's not correct.

There’s shed skin in the corner. Jonathan thinks it’s his own, although he doesn’t remember scratching it off.

“You’re looking much better,” the Count observes, proudly, and the part of him that never got the desired approval from his father sits up on its hind legs and barks.

He stifles it down, buries it under the hunger. The hunger is easier. Simpler. “Are you going to let me out?” His voice is unrecognizable.

The pause that follows is enough to kill him all over again.

Then Dracula’s extending a hand down and smiling. Jonathan doesn’t want to touch him, but the other choice is to stay in the box and really, that’s not a choice at all and they both know it.

“What now?” Jonathan asks after he’s eaten. His mouth feels numb. The child’s corpse is so small and so cold, and yet he is not horrified. There’s just… _nothing_.

“Your hair’s grown back,” Dracula says, running a hand through it. Jonathan feels absurdly like a pet, but he says nothing. “If you behave,” the Count tells him, almost like he knows exactly what Jonathan’s thinking — _and really, why shouldn’t he? he knows everything else —_ “I won’t put you back in the box. You have my word.”

“What’s that worth?”

This startles a laugh out of the Count, exposing those horrible teeth. “Oh, I made the right choice keeping you.”

Jonathan tongues his own elongated canines and doesn’t cry.

At some point, Dracula introduces him to the other two brides, half-starved and all-mad creatures who resemble Mina in the way a hyena resembles a housecat.

“What are their names?” Jonathan asks.

Dracula shrugs. “I don’t bother with that. That one’s Kat, because she used to scratch, and the other’s Prosta. Bit of a joke, there, if you speak Romanian.”

Jonathan looks to the brides for some sign of offense, but there is none.

 _“Însetat_ ,” the fair one, Prosta, murmurs. She’s chewed off parts of her own lips, and they haven’t grown back. She could have been lovely once, before her death, and somehow it’s the vestiges of past beauty that makes her even more horrible to look at. A dull chain dangles from her neck, the sort that crucifixes would hang on.

“Yes, you always are,” the Count replies dismissively.

The dark-haired one, Kat, has what remains of an aquiline nose. Maybe she was part of the aristocracy at one point. Her fists clench, long nails sinking into dead flesh, as she tries to speak.

“Hhhh—Whu—wherr—”

Jonathan wonders if she’s trying to ask after her sister, the one Jonathan had tried to free, the one the Count had killed _(because of him)_ but the words never come to her lips. Her mind is probably liquid by now.

Dracula raises an eyebrow and turns to Jonathan, clearly relishing the horror on his newest bride’s face. “I hope you see why I was so eager for new company.”

* * *

“You don’t sleep,” Jonathan says when Dracula first shows him to his room. It’s larger than the guest room Jonathan slept in, more ornate, but far less than he would have expected.

The Count adjusts the heavy velvet drapes, although they seem to only be covering a stone wall. “Aren’t you the quick study.”

Feeling clumsy and thick, Jonathan scowls.

“I assume you’re wondering what the bed is for.” Dracula turns to lie down on it, ankles crossed, arms folded behind his head. There’s something glittering in his eyes that Jonathan’s learned to fear, something sadistic and mocking.

“I am _not_ ,” Jonathan isn’t sure why he’s so suddenly furious, except that he is.

“Oh, darling, don’t take that tone with me. You’re _English_ , who can expect you to know anything about the pleasures of the human body?” Dracula tilts his head back and laughs that wicked, all-too-clever laugh, and what’s left of Jonathan’s blood _boils_.

“Do you have intercourse with your victims before or after you torture them to death?” Jonathan spits, stepping closer to the bed out of fury.

The Count smirks cruelly. “I try to switch it up, usually. Gets boring, otherwise. I’d meant to string you up and cut your pretty tongue out as an hors d'oeuvre, but alas,” he spreads his pale hands. “I had a bit of trouble controlling myself once you pricked your finger right in front of me. _Tease_.”

Purposefully misreading Jonathan’s horror for disappointment, the Countbeckons him closer. “Don’t pout at me, Johnny. We’ve eternities for torture now.”

Mina would have something clever to say, something polite and ladylike that still encompassed the idea of feeding Count Dracula his own innards, but Jonathan’s never been his brave-hearted fiance.

“Thinking of Mina again?” The Count practically _oozes_ disgust, and if Jonathan was still sensitive to temperature he’s sure the room would chill.

“You _can_ read minds!”

“Or you’re horribly predictable _and_ one of my brides, so I know you just about as well as I know myself.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Johnny,” and now he’s rising from the bed, taking Jonathan’s hands in a deceptively simple grip.

“And nothing to worry about, either. Soon I’ll hollow you out so deep that you’ll know nothing but me.”

“Can I sit here?” Jonathan asks, feeling horribly like a primary schooler. Prosta looks up at him with dull eyes, and he wonders if the Count had hollowed her out before he turned her. But she doesn’t attack, which is more than he’d expected, so Jonathan takes a seat on the steps beside her.

He’s got a book from the Count’s library in hand ( _his_ library too, now, isn’t that how marriage worked?) and a need to escape, so he doesn’t bother trying to make conversation. Prosta’s humming a lively dirge as she plucks her fingernails off and pops them into her mouth, one by one. They make sickening sounds when she chews.

 _Give it twenty years, fifty,_ Jonathan thinks. _You’ll probably be eating your fingernails too._ If he even _has_ fingers when the Count’s done with him.

Prosta, when she’s not starving, is agreeable in the same way that a dog is agreeable, although it’s not as though Jonathan can really judge. She speaks rarely, and it’s only two phrases in broken Romanian: _Însetat_ and _omoara-mă_ , the same thing Jonathan had heard from the corpses. He thinks he has a good idea of what it means by now.

The other, Kat, mistrusts him, whether because of his status as the Count’s favorite or because she’d figured out what happened to her sister while she was in that box.

But he’s as much Dracula’s toy as the other two, and that doesn’t change because he gets to sleep in a bed and not a box.

**Author's Note:**

> and we're back, having finished episode 2 and being incredibly disappointed with it. this is what happens when you spend all of your time making puns and circle-jerking about how clever you are, kids.


End file.
